How to Coach People Effectively

If you’re asking whether this is relevant to you because you’re not a coach, think again. Many of us are. For example, if you’re a software engineer, you’re expected to coach junior engineers and interns. Likewise if you’re a manager or a founder. As a tech advisor to CXOs, I coach them on how to run their startup better. Many of us are coaches regardless of our job title, and being successful as a coach bolsters our careers.

With this in mind, let’s see how we can coach people better:

Have a high barrier to entry

Multiple people told me they want to be coached, but they didn’t take it seriously. They didn’t show the commitment required. They wasted a lot of my time. To turn these tourists away, have a high barrier to entry.

Charge a fee: For a junior engineer, I’d recommend ₹1000 per hour with a ₹10K advance, to be repeated when the 10K runs out¹. This may not be a significant amount of money for you² but that’s not the point. It’s to turn away people who are not serious. Simply getting them to say that they’re serious doesn’t cut it. Actions speak louder than words. Take a fee. And in advance, not postpaid — when I actually do the transfer, it makes me stop and re-confirm my commitment more than agreeing to pay later. If you’re worried that you’re excluding people earlier in their career by charging, remind yourself that 10K is nothing for an engineer earning maybe 9 lakhs a year. The same person takes a flight home or buys a ₹30K phone. So it’s not a question of money but of willingness. And if they’re not willing to spend, you’d have saved your energy.

Give homework: Before taking someone on for coaching, give them homework. Here’s mine. It involves watching a 2-hour video and reading a 20-page blog post. Set the bar high. Getting coached is hard work, harder than watching a 2-hour video, and if someone can’t even watch a 2-hour video, you’ll save your time by turning them away. Think of how hard the IIT entrance exam is.

Offer an off-ramp: Tell them, “We can do this any time, need not be now. How about after 6 months or a year?” If you know something about their life, personalise the message: “Considering you’re getting married / had a baby, why don’t we do this after a year?” Offering an off-ramp is a technique from sales: if they take the off-ramp, it means they’re not serious about what you’re offering. A committed person would disagree saying, “No, I want to do it now.” I made the mistake of being eager to help, offering coaching to people I thought could benefit, but I only ended up frustrated. So, I think twice before offering coaching. The request should come from them. Even if I do offer coaching, I immediately say, “We could do this any time, such as 6 months or a year from now, need not be now. So when you’re ready, get back to me.”

Clarify goals

Ask what he wants to get out of the coaching. It’s okay if it’s vague, like “get ahead in my career”. It’s your job as the coach to clarify these. If the coachee had perfect clarity, he wouldn’t need you in the first place.

Clarify true goals. Someone told me last week that he wants to start a services company.

“Why?”

“So that I get more experience, more networking, more reputation, etc.”

“And what does that lead to?”

“Oh, so that I can get hired as a principal engineer.”

“So that’s the real goal. Starting a services company is just a means to an end. If there’s a shorter path to this goal, we can consider it.”

“Sure.”

Clarify vague concerns

If the coachee says that doing a project in a certain way may not work out, ask what that means. Does it mean it will take long? Fail? Require too much budget? Does it means he’ll be criticised? Concerns can and often are emotional.

You can’t address vague concerns any more than you can get in a taxi and say, “Take me to a good place.” Giving a solution to an unclear problem doesn’t work. Don’t ramble on.

Environment

In-person is best, with video being the second best, and phone the third. Async like messaging doesn’t work because you have to go back and forth a dozen or more times, which works better synchronously.

Listen

Beginning coaches, including me earlier, make the mistake of telling people what they need to know. For example, I was coaching someone who was obsessive about precise communication. Instead of saying, “Driving fast is dangerous”, he’d say, “Driving at elevated speeds is statistically correlated with an increased probability of adverse outcomes like death, permanent disability or complete but total disability.” Telling him, “Man, don’t talk like a textbook. Make it simple. Say Driving fast is dangerous” didn’t work. People have a reason to do what they’re doing. They’re not dumb. You need to draw that reason out and address it. This requires a lot of patience. Asking in an annoyed tone, Why do you talk like that? doesn’t work and may even push him further into his shell. Instead, you need to ask it in a calm, introspective tone.

Give him a lot of time to answer. When we don’t get an immediate answer, many of us proceed to fill the silence by saying something. Instead, embrace the silence.

Listening is about meeting people where they are. Imagine a group of people taking a hike. If one of them is left behind, the leader walks back to meet him, and gently helps him move forward. Similarly, as a coach, you can’t stand where you are and demand that the coachee run forward to meet you. Instead, you have to walk back and meet him where he is. You may have made these same mistakes earlier in your life and grown, but now you have to revisit them.

You may have to ask the question multiple times in different ways:

“Why do you communicate so precisely?” <silence>

“Do you believe that as an engineer, you’re expected to communicate precisely?”

“Kind of”

As he’s speaking, nod and smile if appropriate to indicate that you’re listening and not judging. If it’s on the phone, say “hmmm” or “okay” in an encouraging tone.

“Do you think it will reflect poorly on you if you don’t communicate precisely?”

“Kind of, in my last startup, I communicated imprecisely and I was sidelined.”

“Hmmm… Yeah, you were telling me about the bad attitude of your two cofounders. Do you think they’d have sidelined you even if you communicated precisely?”

“Oh…. now that you mention it, yes, it’s likely.”

“So then precise communication may not help.”

“Right.”

“I’ll tell you something, and you tell me what you understood. Ready? Okay, here goes: Futurecam configures the AVCaptureDevice with the right AVCapturePhotoSettings, then receives multiple CMSampleBuffers from it, blends them using a CIBlendKernel and finally saves the result to the PHPhotoLibrary. What did you understand?”

“Little”

“Let’s try another version: Futurecam takes multiple photos, combines them into one, and saves them to the photo gallery on your phone. Now what did you understand?”

“Now I understand how it works”

“Do you realise that I actually communicated less precisely to you, but you actually understood more?”

“Oh….. this is eye-opening”

“Communication is about the listener, not the speaker. What you say doesn’t matter. What they understand matters.”

“Oh, all this while, I was focused on speaking precisely, but I actually need to focus on what they’re understanding.”

“Yes!”

“Let’s consider this scenario: Say you’re talking to two people, Venkat and Ramesh. You’re able to understand clearly what Venkat says but not Ramesh. Who would you respect more?”

“Venkat”

“Say both of them are designers, and you need to hire a designer. Whom would you call?”

“Venkat”

“Even if Ramesh is actually communicating more precisely, because it’s not getting through to you, he’s being penalised, right?”

“Oh”

“Now, if after this conversation, Ramesh pats himself on his back that he spoke precisely what he had in mind, does it help him get the job?”

“No. Oh, so I’ve been like Ramesh, but I should be more like Venkat.”

Before making a statement, see if you can ask a question. Asking is better than telling.

Make the coachee walk down the path to the conclusion and see it with his own eyes. You can’t give him a readymade conclusion — he won’t accept it. He may say yes but he won’t implement it, because he’s not fully bought in.

Communicate by example

Communicate by example (Venkat and Ramesh above) rather than theory (People who communicate clearly get ahead). It has to be colorful.

A variant of an example is a story you’ve witnessed or been part of. It’s all the better if the story is about a company or person that people look up to, like Google.

When you give negative examples, don’t use the coachee as the example. Instead use a fictitious third person like Ramesh, to make it non-threatening. Being coached is already very hard. Don’t make it harder for him.

Use third-party resources

When trying to communicate that engineers are paid for the value of what they create, not just the technical complexity, I’ve sent my coachee a link to Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer. Similarly, send links to appropriate Youtube videos, blog posts, tweets, book summaries, etc. Different people have different styles of communicating and one of them may work better than your own style for a particular conversation.

Besides, it bolsters your credibility — you’re not the only coach advocating this.

One conversation at once

Sometimes we end up having two conversations at once and everything gets mixed up and we’re stuck. When that happens, pick one topic and have a conversation about that alone. For example, I sometimes say, “This conversation has become confusing because we’re talking about two different things at once: whether you should work on the frontend, and how to work effectively with your boss. Let’s have one conversation at once. First, let’s talk about how to work on the frontend. We’ll talk only about this for now. Okay?” Write it down in a scratchpad Notion page (see below) in big font. Conversations are unhelpful when one or both sides lose track of the topic being discussed.

If an unrelated topic comes up, say “We’re talking about whether to work on the frontend. Let’s park the question of how to resolve the disagreement with Navya.”

Sometimes you’re discussing A and you find that you need to discuss B to get clarity on A. In such a case, say, “Let’s park A and discuss B.” Cross out A in the scratchpad and write B in a big font. When you’re done with B and reach a conclusion both of you agree on, cross out B in the scratchpad and write A.

Have a visual aid

Have a shared Notion page as a scratchpad, as a visual aid. If you don’t, you’re relying on them to remember everything in their mind on top of having a difficult conversation. This never works out. Don’t be lazy to type. So when I say the topic is working on the frontend, I erase everything in the page and type in a giant font Should you work on the frontend?

If you’re talking about multiple benefits from doing something, list them as bullets.

Don’t hesitate to draw a simple diagram to communicate something, using pen and paper or a whiteboard. If it’s remote, photograph it with your phone. You don’t need professional-quality infographics. For example, instead of saying “A project’s scope, time, quality and manpower are at odds”, show:

Show, don’t tell.

Give directive advice

When giving advice, be directive, not conceptual. Instead of “Be proactive” say, “From now on, tell your manager every week what you accomplished the past week.” Big words like proactive don’t help. The coachee doesn’t know how to be proactive. If he did, he’d already have been proactive and wouldn’t need your coaching in the first place.

Ask him to note down such directive advice in a Notion page. It’s better for him to write than you because the act of noting it down will reinforce the lesson.

Over the course of the coaching, accumulate a list of actionable advice. This will add immense value for the coachee to refer to later and get the bottom line: “Okay, we talked for dozens of hours, but what do I do?” This Notion page is separate from the scratchpad I mentioned above, which is temporary.

Notice that directive statements are different from factual ones. “People who give their manager a weekly update grow faster in their careers” is a factual one. “Give your manager a weekly update” is a directive statement — it tells the coachee to do something. Factual statements belong in Wikipedia.

Silence needn’t mean agreement

If you said something to your coachee, and he doesn’t say anything, it doesn’t mean he agreed. Some people come from a culture of open disagreement, like Google, where people don’t hold back, so silence generally means agreement. Others come from a culture where they don’t feel safe to openly disagree, so silence generally means disagreement. So if you gave him advice, ask him what he thinks. Ask it in an unbiased way: “What do you think?” Not a biased “Do you agree?” which drives people to say yes.

Once agreed upon, insist on immediate implementation

Once you agreed on a change, if the coachee goes back to his old behavior, call it out immediately. The point of coaching is not to accumulate a big todo list of changes but to actually change one’s behavior, and there’s no time like the present to do it.

For example, if you’d agreed to less precise communication, and he says, “In the recent past, I have had communications and interactions with my immediate reporting manager that suggest an increased likelihood of unhappiness…”, stop him and ask, “What did we agree to?” If he says it, he’ll remember better than you saying it. Once he answers, tell him to rephrase what he said about his manager to be more concise.

You might find he hasn’t really understood what he agreed to. In this case, he may say, “In the recent past, I have had communications and interactions with my reporting manager that suggest an increased likelihood of unhappiness…” When you ask what changed, he may say “I removed the word immediate in immediate reporting manager to simplify it”. At this point, don’t retort, “Come on dude, you didn’t get it at all!” Instead ask, “How can you simplify it further?” If he doesn’t get it, ask him for the names of a colleague. If he says Kumar, ask, “How might Kumar say it if he were in your shoes?” He might say, “Kumar would say, My manager is unhappy with me.” Then ask, “Is that simpler or more complex than your way of saying it?” Again, ask it as a question rather than making a statement.

Only when you’re fully satisfied that he’s learnt and implemented the agreed-upon change can you go back to the original conversation. Every behavior change when agreed upon needs to be immediately implemented. The point of coaching is not to accumulate a big to-do list of changes to make in the future (which never happens).

Don’t follow up

If you give homework like, “Write down where you want to be in 5 years” don’t follow up. Don’t message him to ask, “Have you done it?” You’re not his mom to run behind him. If he doesn’t do it, and the coaching peters out, let it.

Express vulnerability

This will break down the barriers between you and the coachee. Otherwise, it’s hard for him to be vulnerable with you.

1. Don’t charge X rupees per month, since it forces them to end the coaching after a few months, or if they want to take a break for a few months. Long-term coaching delivers a lot of value

2. Don’t ask, “How much do I need to charge to make this worthwhile for me?” That won’t be affordable to someone early in his career. In other words, coaching individuals (B2C) doesn’t typically work as a source of income.